


Siren, A Short Story

by Evil_is_Relative



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, I half wrote this as descriptive word play if I'm honest, Loneliness, Mythology - Freeform, Siren, Tumblr Prompt, Writing Prompt, mermaid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-08-18
Packaged: 2019-06-29 07:19:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15724626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evil_is_Relative/pseuds/Evil_is_Relative
Summary: PROMPT:You’re a mermaid who’s fallen in love with a human that you’ve been observing for a long time. You wish to speak with them and confess your feelings but there’s a language barrier between you and them. They speak in a phonetic language, you speak in music. Write what happens next.For me, what happened next was a lot of scenery/music word play and my first main F/F romance fluff.





	Siren, A Short Story

     Heartbreak was a song I knew well. I’d wailed it to the uncaring winds for decades, harmonizing with the sounds of calm and tempest alike. Whales had been my chorus and the waves my percussion. Sailors believed my kind to lay in wait, luring them to their doom with our voices and beauty. Perhaps for some that truly is the case, but for me, the truth was much more complicated and yet, much simpler than a wish to cause mere destruction.

     I was lonely.

     There were once many mermaids on these islands. They’d left over the years, or been killed. The wild vastness of the sea doesn’t just call to the human men that set themselves adrift on vessels of wood and cloth that they believe can ride the waves like any other beast. I’d watched them go in and out for more years than I had the ability to count. Unlike my sisters, they came back, most of the time. Mermaids haven’t the ability to weep, so sometimes, when I’d see them return where my sisters had not, I would scream at them, shriek and wail in a voice that entranced them. The more I hated them, the more they loved me.

     It was after one such bout of grief that I looked up and saw a ship. The men on it raced over it like bottom feeders on a sunken carcass. A massive, unwieldy thing, it made my heart tighten behind my breast, the comb I detangled my hair with falling from my hand, unheeded. The blue banner that whipped and undulated in the rising wind was familiar to me, and filled me with dread and fear.

     As I said, there were once many mermaids here. This harbor was too dear to them to let a thing like a clan of mermaids sink their laden vessels.

     My rage rose within me, bringing song to my lips and strength to my arms, my fingers digging into the rock and barnacles to raise me to the highest point the water still reached, the spray of crashing waves mixing with the sudden rain. Clouds boiled across the sky, their bases dark as the sea. In the abrupt, early twilight, they saw me. A grim smile curled my lips and I reached for them, beckoned them to me. Ropes dropped from benumbed hands. Bare feet shuffled across slippery wood to gaze at me better. In their eyes I saw fear and adoration, on their mouths I saw prayer.

     Perhaps they should learn mercy themselves before demanding it of others.

     The rocks were not kind to the hull. They never were. The sea poured in and the boats went out, quickly overturned by waves higher than the men were tall and battering them back. As the storm subsided, the clouds departed, leaving the horizon as barren and empty as I felt. Weary with emotion if not exertion, I dove back into the sheltering water to see what was left.

     Treasure. Bolts of the weavings the human women spent most of their life at, spinning endless lengths of thread and passing them through and between each other. A little gold, which I left. Gold was heavy and I had no wish to be burdened so. Jewels, which I gathered. Spices, foods, and bottled liquids that would be ruined soon if they weren’t already. Leaving the ship, I went to look at the men.

     They had died scared. The water was still tinged red in some calmer areas, from wounds and from their bodies’ rejection of the saltwater. Eyes stared still. I hated that, but there was little I could do about it. Still, I memorized their faces. I liked to remember the murderers I killed.

     Taking the jewels, I swam to my grotto.

     Twin sapphires were pried from their settings, placed in the empty sockets of the skull of my youngest sister. They weren’t quite the right color, but I think she wouldn’t have minded. A pair of garnets joined the mosaic around my middle sister, a trio of moonstones gleamed around my mother’s, the shimmering colors reminding me of her hair. Drifting back, I regarded what was left of my family and nodded, allowing myself to sink to the seabed.

     My webbed hands absently rubbed the ever-aching spot the harpoon had left in me, ripping my fin and scarring me forever, dooming me to never venture the open sea. I had lost many sisters to the ocean. They left to find a triton and start new families, or to feel the thrill of the massive currents, or simply preferring warmer waters.

     Oh, how I wished I could join them.

~~~

     The sunrise was the color of blood. Fitting, I suppose. I watched it as I struggled to untie the knots in my hair. I never had found my comb. Crabs and starfish scuttled around me, seagulls already up and squawking to anyone that would listen. By now, the humans would realize the ship wasn’t coming. It had been spotted coming by the smaller boats, and now was gone. There was no other harbor for over a week. That was the entire reason they’d invaded our home, after all.

     I was in my favorite spot for hearing about such things. The beach was more pebbles than sand, and more rocky outcrops than either. I could not be seen by the women that came down to gossip and look for bits of this or that floating ashore, who sat and mended nets or small sails. I could hear them just fine, though.

     I’d not understood their language at first, and to be entirely truthful it was still difficult for me if my mind was not to the task. Strange, unnatural sounds, really. I could understand seagulls better than humans, and seagulls were notoriously stupid.

     The first sliver of sun was just glinting off the water, far too early for any of the human women to even think of coming down, but I had nothing better to do. I was therefore understandably surprised to hear the rounded bits of rock scraping and crunching under the hurried feet of a human. I was even more surprised to hear them splash right out into the water.

     Curiosity welled in me, spurring me to slip down into the water to where the stubborn rock was soothed and kissed by waves until it softened and smoothed. Peeking around, I tilted my head, trying to make some sense of the senseless.

     The human was young, just of the age that they picked a sailor and made another. The cloth she wore was plain and unadorned, and after a moment I realized it looked wrong because they usually wore something over it. I could see why; the spray instantly soaked it, and I could see her through it almost as well as if she hadn’t bothered. We weren’t so different above the waist. I wondered if her heart had the ability to wail as mine did.

     Then she proved it.

     I stared, shocked, heart hammering harder than I could recall. Ugly human words became beautiful from her lips, floating on the breeze and blending with the sea, beckoning, as I had beckoned, someone to return. Eyes dark as the rock leaked oceans of their own, and the wind tangled curling hair the shade of sunken timber.

     Unable to move, barely able to breathe, I spied upon her until her song was lost to a single sob, and she stared, empty, over the ceaseless waves.

     “Nimue!”

     We both jumped. A woman from the village was rushing down the path, hand holding her head covering in place. “Child, what are you doing here?”

     The turning of her head had me mourning the loss of her eyes, breaking me from their spell. “He’s gone,” she croaked, shoulders shaking. “He’s gone…”

     “Oh, child,” the elder human’s face softened, and she waded right out into the sea and put her shawl around the girl. I couldn’t hear what she said to comfort her, for the first time feeling as if I had done something unbearably wrong. A storm rose in me, and I dove under the waves to quell it, swimming far too hard and too far for my injury.

     The next ship passed without incident.

~~~

     She sang often, I learned. At first, the other women coaxed her, and her songs were barely worth the name. Knowing what she could do kept me from abandoning my surveillance. After months, an eternity that normally would have passed quickly for me, golden sound finally rode the wind around her, bringing joy to the hearts of the women and confusion to my own.

     The first time she smiled again—genuinely smiled, not the tense curling of lips she used to placate others—I sang for days. My heart lifted notes from me that raised the clouds and brought the fish. The weather was fair every day I saw her smile. Men marveled at the uncommonly good weather and anticipated profits. When she stood alone to look out to sea and weep, the sky wept with her, a calm drizzle to harmonize my desolate tunes.

     Winter opened an ache inside me that hadn’t existed before. It was in good company with those already there, but the longing not just to hear her, but to see her, drove me out into too many winter storms. She came down once in a while, seeking solitude, I surmised. She practiced tunes that she wasn’t quite sure of, changed them to suit her, and worked on some of her own. It was much, much easier for me to understand the language when she sung it. I began to wonder what would happen if I tried to sing back.

     Spring brought storms and a flurry of ships. The ships brought a flurry of sailors. The women brought a flurry of gossip back to the beach for me to overhear. Most of it was uninteresting. The land was going to war again. I wasn’t surprised. Human men were fond of attacking anything, I’d found. When they didn’t have something more convenient to rail against, they turned on each other. As the days passed, I stayed for Nimue’s songs. The women wanted her to go somewhere, to do something with her life and her voice in a city inland. Nimue would pale and demure, clearly uncomfortable with the thought.

     Then, one day, one of them asked her an entirely different question. It took me several breaths to be able to discern their words again, made all the more difficult by my struggles. Was she going to accept what? From whom? What did someone want with her?

     “Who” turned out to be a sailor from one of the big ships I’d let through. “What” turned out to be courting her. The unseasonable hail was almost as terrifying to them as my shriek of mingled rage and denial. They couldn’t see me, but they could certainly hear me, and they raced up the path to the shelter of their village as fast as their legs could carry them, even Nimue.

     I curled in my grotto for days, trying to work through what I was feeling. At long last, one night as the sky glowed lavender, a brilliant shine of cerulean on the horizon where it met the sea the only sign that the sun had even risen that morning, I ventured out and found myself at the beach. Pebbles danced over my fingers, idly lifting them from their rest only to send them tumbling back down. Light flashed over their slick surfaces and the arching shapes of water that vanished in the blink of an eye.

     The sound of them shifting under her feet was familiar by now, distinctive from anyone else’s. Somehow, my heart ended up in my throat and chest simultaneously, drumming a rapid percussion line behind my breast and preventing any melody from joining it. I listened, wondering what had driven her to the shore this time, and if she would sing about it.

     Her words were not song, but my ears still received them as such.

     “I know you’re there.”

     My breath stuttered. Pebbles fractured between the grip of my fingers.

     “You’ve been there often,” she went on, oblivious to her effect on me, “ever since my father died. He always used to say you’d take him one day, that one of you was left. He always told me not to be bitter about it.” There was a long pause. “I can’t hate you for it. I used to sneak down the rocks as a child to the dangerous places to hear you. You always sounded so sad. I learned to sing, listening to you, I think.”

     Light winked off the curl of tiny waves out to the curve of the world, the light of the stars caught and held for less than a heartbeat, innumerable times each second. My eyes didn’t move from those strangely cheerful twinkles, as if my home were amused at my reaction.

     “Did you know you left me alone? Is that why you took to watching over me when you could?” Nimue asked, sounding curious. Long moments passed in quiet, the lapping of the waves, the rushing of it through and over the pebbles and rocks filling the void her voice had left. “Whatever your reasons,” she said at length, “I appreciate it. I know it’s silly, but I don’t feel quite so alone when you’re nearby.” Another pause, then the shifting of her weight. She was leaving, without ever knowing why I did what I did. I thought of her suitor whose home was far away, and the women urging her to head to the city and sing for the rich, and my heart fell through me deep into the earth.

     My lips parted, and a hopeless, sad note wafted quietly out of it, soft as the first kiss of moonlight. It led to another, and another followed. Eerie and sorrowful, ebbing and flowing in volume with the incoming waves, it echoed through my grotto and the enshrined remnants there. It wove through the rock formations and dove beneath the waves. It danced with the whales and shimmered off the scales of schools of fish. I thought of her smile and it rose to the stars, of her sorrow and it rang with the stones beneath us. My voice lilted with joy at the thought of her, and deepened in mourning at the very idea of her leaving.

     Ripples grow from a single small point, growing to waves if they encounter nothing, but for the most part merging and vanishing within a bigger disturbance. The tide swallowed the last notes of my song. I kept my eyes closed and listened to it for many heartbeats. Normally such a song would bring rain, but something kept the clouds at bay over me, the moon shining through. She had risen during my song and crept closer to listen.

     “That was beautiful.”

     My eyes opened almost as fast as the indrawn breath rushed into my chest. Nimue waded in the sea before me, eyes and hair dark as the shadows under the waves. The soft smile on her face trapped that breath in my lungs, the slight upward curl of her lips more perfect than the curve of any shell. Dumbly, I watched her wade slowly toward me, lowering herself into the ocean beside me. I twitched as her hands came up, warm against my cheeks. We were silent, but symphonies filled me as the lips that made such wonderful music brushed over my own.

     Dark eyes holding mine as surely as I had held any sailor’s, she smiled gently, eyes glistening with wet. “There is nothing the world beyond could offer me more beautiful than what I heard in your song.”

~~~

     The weather was fair that year, and the next. Nimue’s suitor persisted, but eventually accepted her rejection. We spent most of our time together, and she developed a reputation for being quite fey. She lit the lantern in the tower that warned ships, unafraid to venture onto the little rocky island that had given so many others to the waves. I never learned to speak as humans do, but I didn’t need to. As our song grew and changed, so did she, until one day, long after she should have aged and the village began to wonder, before they could start to fear, she promised the littlest of them that she’d always look after them, and walked into the sea. She kept her promise, with my help, and when war came storms blocked enemy ships. When the cold came the ice never pulled anyone under. When the fish fled we called them back. Some years weren’t easy, but this village, this bay, never had the worst of it. Through it all, the sea kept singing, and so did we.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are always appreciated. They help me grow as a writer and encourage me to write more. :)


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